Online secure payment provider PayPal may be set to make a reentry into the online gaming market in the US.
This pleases us at Casino Daily News for two reasons.
The first one is the very marketplace. The US has seen some pretty draconian anti-gaming legislation  in recent years, most notoriously the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIEGA) 2006 which dealt a hammer blow to gamers there.
The ensuing ‘Black Friday’ of 2011 saw 3 major online Poker Rooms, PokerStars  Cereus and Full Tilt Poker pounced on with charges of having not only violated the act but also involved in illegal activities including money laundering (United States v Scheinberg et al).
This left hundreds of thousands of online Poker players high and dry, with their accounts frozen.
However, there has been something of, well, a thaw in the US since then, as we have reported.
New Jersey perhaps unsurprisingly has been the first State to legalize online gaming in all its guises, with Delaware and Nevada allowing it in a more skinned-down form.
And now for PayPal. This highly respected provider dates back to the infancy of eCommerce in the heady days of the late 1990s when 2 companies, x.com and confinity, merged.
PayPal was later taken over by eBay, the website it was pretty much made for, and continued to go from strength to strength.
However, the relationship with our industry was not always benign — PayPal had offered its services for gamers in the early days, but concerned with money laundering, fraud and other nefarious activities, it withdrew from the market in 2002.
Happily, in recent years it’s been making a slow but steady comeback.
For instance, reputable casino Betway carry PayPal as a payment provider, and there are sure to be plenty more following suit — including US-compatible sites.
All good news for our sometimes-beleaguered industry!